


right here in the old therebefore

by californianNostalgia



Category: A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes - Suzanne Collins, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, F/M, Lucy Gray killed Coriolanus Snow, POV Multiple, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Torture, War, death makes Coriolanus a better person, here's to the victors of district twelve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:33:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26423428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/californianNostalgia/pseuds/californianNostalgia
Summary: There’s a ghost at the Hanging Tree. Katniss sees him first when she’s six, her hair in braids, the song about the growing gallows fresh in her mind.This changes nothing. This changes some things. (In which Lucy Gray killed Coriolanus at the lake.)
Relationships: Katniss Everdeen/Peeta Mellark, Lucy Gray Baird/Coriolanus Snow
Comments: 32
Kudos: 123





	1. Songbirds

There’s a ghost at the Hanging Tree.

Katniss sees him first when she’s six, her hair in braids, the song about the growing gallows fresh in her mind. He’s old, old enough for the mines. His eyes are bluer than the sky and his curls are almost white, white like snow. He’s in a neat cream shirt and black trousers. Katniss stops to stare, wondering where he came from. He’s dressed too rich for District 12.

“Hello,” he says, and she knows from his accent that he is Capitol. She turns and runs. 

* * *

Her father sang her songs and told her stories when she was as young as six and still wore two braids. One rainy night, when the ceiling was getting hammered by the storm, when Prim and her mother were dozing, he tucked her in and told her a ghost story.

“There once was a girl who could sing to snakes.”

“Why snakes?” Katniss asked.

“She liked snakes. She wasn’t afraid of them.”

Katniss nodded in understanding.

“She had a large family, and every one of them were singers. They sang for the forest, together with their instruments and their dances. The mockingjays would echo their songs through the whole woods. The people of their town loved the girl. But one day, bad people took her from her family to a crumbling city on a hill.”

“Like the Reaping?”

Her father paused. He traced her forehead with his thumb. “Like the Reaping. The girl was brave, but she was growing afraid. The city was too big and she couldn’t find a way out. The bad people told her she would have to find her way through a terrible maze if she ever wanted to go home. She cried in her stone prison, despairing of her fortune.”

“What was her name?” Katniss asked, suddenly finding this information very important.

“Her name was Lucy Gray.”

“Like the color?”

“Like the color.”

Katniss nodded. “Okay.”

Her father smiled. “Okay. So Lucy Gray was feeling very sad and alone in the stone city, when a boy appeared behind her barred window. There were bars on her windows, see, because she was a prisoner of the city.”

“I know that,” said Katniss, with all the impatience of a six-year-old. “Prisoners have bars on windows.”

“That’s right. The boy knocked on the very bars three times. When Lucy Gray was looking, he gave her a bow and offered her a white rose. He said, ‘Your flower, my lady.’ And Lucy Gray smiled.”

“Did she know him?” Katniss asked.

“No. This was the first time Lucy Gray had seen this boy.”

“Then why did she smile?”

“Maybe she liked the flower.”

Katniss scoffed. “It wasn’t a map or a key. It was just a flower.”

Her father shrugged.

“What was the boy’s name?” Katniss asked.

“Rose.”

“Like Prim?”

“Like Prim.”

Katniss nodded.

“The next morning, when the bad people came to taunt Lucy Gray, they found her holding a white rose. They asked her, ‘Where did you get that?’ She told them, ‘It was a gift.’ The bad people of the stone city thought she had used dark magic to grow the rose, so they went away to plan evil things for Lucy Gray.”

“That isn’t fair,” Katniss protested.

“It’s not,” her father agreed. “These were very bad people. But that night, there were three knocks on the bars on her windows. When Lucy Gray looked, Rose gave her a bow and offered her a white handkerchief. He said, ‘Your lucky charm, my lady.’ Lucy Gray smiled. She asked, ‘Why would I need a charm?’ Rose replied, ‘This will protect you from the snakes.’”

“But she can already sing to snakes,” said Katniss. “She doesn’t need the handkerchief.”

“Rose didn’t know that. Lucy Gray knew. She still took the handkerchief from him, and in thanks, she unwound the orange scarf from her neck and gifted it to Rose. The next morning, when the bad people dragged Lucy Gray to the snake pits, she had the handkerchief in her pocket. The bad people pushed her into the pit. They didn’t expect her to sing.”

Then her father sang a short verse, softly so as not to wake the sleeping members of their family.

> I’ll be along  
> When I’ve finished my song,  
> When I’ve shut down the band,  
> When I’ve played out my hand,  
> When I’ve paid all my debts,  
> When I have no regrets,  
> Right here in  
> The old therebefore,  
> When nothing  
> Is left anymore.

“The snakes danced to Lucy Gray’s song. The bad people were shocked to see her dance with them. They pulled Lucy Gray away from the snakes and locked her back in her stone prison. They were convinced Lucy Gray could do dark magic, and they decided that tomorrow, they would send her into the deadly underground maze to punish her.”

“They’re horrible,” Katniss said.

“They are. But that night, there were three knocks on the bars of Lucy Gray’s windows. When she looked—“

“It was Rose,” Katniss interrupted.

“Yes, it was. But he didn’t give her a bow. He actually looked like he had a very bad cold. He slipped his hand through the bars and offered Lucy Gray a compass. He said, ‘This will lead you through the maze.’ Lucy Gray didn’t smile at the gift. She asked, ‘Is this yours?’ Rose replied, ‘It was my mother’s.’”

“Why was he sick?” Katniss asked.

“That will come later in the story.”

Katniss grumbled at the secret, but nodded.

“The next morning, when the bad people threw Lucy Gray into the dangerous underground maze, she took the compass from her pocket and started walking where the needle pointed her. After the first hour, she came across a crying woman standing in the middle of the tunnel. The woman asked, ‘Have you seen my cousin? I don’t know where he is.’ Lucy Gray said, ‘I don’t know who your cousin is.’ The crying woman evaporated into mist.”

“She was a ghost?” Katniss asked, wide-eyed.

“She was. Lucy Gray went forward, following the compass needle. After the second hour, she came across a crying child standing in the middle of the tunnel. The child asked, ‘Have you seen my brother? I don’t know where he’s gone.’ Lucy Gray said, ‘I don’t know who your brother is.’ The crying child went up in smoke.”

“These ghosts aren’t scary,” said Katniss, six years old and distinctly free of ghosts.

“I guess they aren’t. So Lucy Gray kept going through the maze. After a third hour had passed, she finally began to see a light at the end of the tunnels. But something was standing in her way: a man with a snake’s skin and fangs. The man opened his mouth, and Rose’s voice came out. He said her name, ‘Lucy Gray.’ And she knew the bad people of the stone city had turned Rose into a monster.”

“He became a snake person?” Katniss demanded. “How?”

“They experimented on him with snake venom.”

“Can all snakes do that? Turn you into a snake person?”

“Not normal snakes, no. That doesn’t make normal snakes any less dangerous, mind.”

“I know,” said Katniss. “I’m not going to go looking for snakes.” She might go looking for ghosts, but that was a different case entirely. She already knew where one was.

“Good,” said her father. “So Lucy Gray was faced with the monster that was once her friend. She only had a wilting rose, a handkerchief, and a compass on her person. But she had a better weapon in her sleeves: a venomous snake, from the snake pits of the previous day. Hiding the snake curled around her arm, she slowly approached the monster, and she started to sing.”

Here her father sang the growing gallows song.

> Are you, are you  
> Coming to the tree  
> Where they strung up a man they say murdered three?  
> Strange things did happen here  
> No stranger would it be  
> If we met up at midnight in the hanging tree

“The snake part of the monster was swayed by her song. The human part was not. Using Rose’s voice, the monster asked, ‘What are you doing?’ Lucy Gray said, ‘Trust me.’ When the human part hesitated, Lucy Gray grabbed the monster’s arm, and the venomous snake in her sleeve slithered up to bite the beast.”

“She killed him?” Katniss gasped.

“The story isn’t over yet,” said her father. “The monster howled in pain at the snake bite, then lunged forward to bite Lucy Gray’s neck. Lucy Gray felt the venom enter her body—“

“They both die?” Katniss exclaimed.

“Shh,” said her father, glancing at the shifting forms of Prim and her mother. “Lucy Gray gathered the monster up in her arms. As the venom spread through them both, she sang her third song.”

> Roses are red, love; violets are blue.  
> Birds in the heavens know I love you.  
> Know I love you, oh, know I love you,  
> Birds in the heavens know I love you.

“They started to sprout wings. The monster blinked its eyes, and suddenly he was Rose again. Rose asked, ‘Where will we go?’ Lucy Gray replied, ‘The sweet hereafter.’ Together they transformed into a pair of mockingjays and flew away from the crumbling city, never to be seen again.”

Katniss scrunched up her face. “She loved him?”

“Sounds like it, doesn’t it?”

“Did he love her?”

“He sure acted like it. Do you think he did?”

Katniss ignored the question and asked another of her own. “Can they turn back into humans?”

“No. There’s no going back for them.”

“This is a weird ghost story.”

Her father smoothed the hair back from her face and kissed her cheek. “It is at that.”

* * *

Katniss goes back to the Hanging Tree. The surrounding area is completely deserted except for the ghost. No one comes here if they can help it. The mockingjays trill random songs from the nearby woods.

The ghost looks the same as he did last time—neatly pressed, thoroughly Capitol.

“Are you dead?” she asks him.

“What do you think?” he snipes, but six-year-old Katniss isn’t threatened by a ghost she doesn’t know.

“Why are you here?” she asks.

“Because I died here,” says the ghost.

“But you’re Capitol.”

“I could’ve been a Peacekeeper. You don’t know.”

“Peacekeepers don’t look like you.”

“Oh? What do I look like, exactly?”

Katniss glances at the white rose in his shirt pocket. “You look rich.”

“Looks can be crafted,” he says, a bit loftily.

Katniss doesn’t like this ghost.

“How did you die?” she asks.

“Same way everybody else does,” he says. “I stopped breathing.”

“That’s dumb.”

“It’s not nice to judge a dead person.”

“You’re not nice. I can judge you.”

The ghost laughs, something ringing hollow in his voice. “Clever girl.”

“Can anyone see you?” she asks.

“No,” he says. “No one has ever been able to see me. Until you, I suppose.”

“That’s weird.”

“It certainly is.”

“Why haven’t I seen more ghosts around?”

“Maybe I’m the only ghost you can see.”

Katniss pauses to think of more questions she wants to ask. “What’s your name?”

“I’m not going to tell you my name.”

“Why not?”

“For one, it would be embarrassing if word got out that I’m a ghost in some backwater district.”

The ghost is insufferable. Katniss leaves.

There’s a ghost on the Reaping podium.

Peeta can’t think of anything else she could be. She’s dressed in a colorful ruffled skirt, if a bit faded, and something about her graceful stance draws his eye. Everyone else seems to be pretending not to see her, though. His mother certainly would’ve had something to say, if she could see her.

His brothers are standing inside the Reaping circle. At six years old, Peeta understands that his brothers getting chosen for the Hunger Games would be very, very bad. He’s nervous, but his curiosity is overtaking his nervousness. He can't look away from the ghost in the rainbow dress.

The ghost notices. Her eyes widen. Then she smiles with her whole face, bright and warm and happy, and Peeta is suddenly reminded of a girl with two braids who stood up to sing for the class.

The ghost jumps off the podium and walks through the crowds over to him. Somehow she makes plain walking look graceful. She comes to a stop in front of him, and even though the Reaping is still going on, Peeta finds his attention stolen by the ghost.

“Hello,” she says. “I know you can’t answer me right now, and I’m sorry if I’m freaking you out, but—can you see me?”

Peeta blinks at her. He slowly lowers his head, pretending to stare at his feet, then raises his head again.

The ghost grins. She can’t be older than his brothers. “Oh, this is amazing. It’s a pleasure to meet you, sweetheart. My name is Lucy Gray.”

* * *

After her father dies and her mother goes catatonic—after the boy from the bakery saves her life with two loaves of burned bread—Katniss goes to the Hanging Tree.

“Why can’t I see my father’s ghost?” she demands.

“Hello to you too,” the ghost says. “Maybe he’s not a ghost. Maybe he’s a ghost you can’t see. I wouldn’t know.”

“Is there anything you do know?” she snarls, grief and fear and hunger warring inside her.

“Nothing that would interest you, I’m afraid.” His gaze flicks over her in a critical once-over. “Do you have lima beans in stock?”

“What?”

“Boil some greens,” he tells her.

“I don’t have greens!” Rage bubbles over. “I don’t have _anything_ , you stupid ghost!”

“You live in a woodland district.” He gives her a hard look. “Think again.”

Later that day, she studies Peeta Mellark from afar and plucks a dandelion. She hauls katniss roots back from the woods and boils them in a big pot.

Her namesake becomes her savior.

Peeta sits under the windows of his house, head bent over his sketchbook. His mother is out on errands, so this is the rare occasion he can risk this.

“That’s beautiful,” says Lucy Gray, sitting beside him.

Peeta gives the barest shrug. No one notices the baker’s boy sitting in his backyard with his frivolous sketchbook. No one cares if he whispers to himself as he draws. No one looks at him anyway, especially if he has a purple bruise filling up the left side of his face like he does now.

He loves being out here, though. Because while he draws, Lucy Gray sings.

All of her songs are a little sad. He supposes that happens when you’re dead. Her voice is incredible, though. It’s nothing like Katniss Everdeen’s. But it’s definitely beautiful.

She sings a favorite of hers today.

> You can’t take my charm.  
> You can’t take my humor.  
> You can’t take my wealth,  
> ‘Cause it’s just a rumor.  
> Nothing you can take from me was ever worth keeping.

It’s his favorite, too. He thinks she might know that.

* * *

Katniss Everdeen volunteers for the Hunger Games to save her sister.

She doesn’t expect to see the ghost in her room as she speeds toward her slaughter.

“I thought you were stuck at that tree,” she says after locking the doors.

“Ghosts can travel where they trod while they were living, and I’ve traveled these tracks before.” He’s still in his immaculate Capitol clothing. He looks barely two years older than her now. “This is practically the basis of all ghost stories ever, keep up.”

She falls onto her plush bed. Traveling to her death in luxury. It makes her sick. “Why are you here? To gloat?”

“You’re not dead yet. Despite your utter distrust in me, I don’t wish death upon you with every moment of my conscious thought.”

Katniss eyes the white rose on his lapel. “Why not?”

“You remind me of my . . . friend. Friends. Cousin. Whatever.”

Katniss stares up at the ceiling. She can barely feel the train moving beneath her. “You’re lying.”

“And what if I am?”

“I’m not in the mood for liars.”

“I came to give advice, you know.”

“You’re Capitol. What would you know about the Games except for some twisted interest in the murder of children?”

“. . . Fine. Fine.” The ghost lets out a sigh. “You remind me of a little girl I once knew, so I would rather you not die.”

Katniss rolls her eyes. “A little girl.”

“I’m not making her up, you suspicious bastard. She was the youngest in a big family. She liked sweet popcorn.”

It doesn’t sound like the whole truth, but it doesn’t sound like a lie either.

“Wow,” she says, her voice completely flat. “What prompted this honest confession?”

“My secrets are outdated and I died a long time ago. All I did was tell people what they wanted to hear, when I was alive. It’s about time I dropped the damn habit. It was pointless anyway.”

“Riveting to hear,” Katniss says.

“Look, I was closely involved in the Tenth Hunger Games, that’s how I know what I’m talking about. Your first kill is always going to be a shock. Get over it. Make allies, they’re useful, but don’t trust them. It’s always a good idea to keep some type of poison on you. Make up a good story to sell to the television, that might twist the odds in your favor, you never know if it might be a useful shield. Remember that the Games won’t end unless you die, so don’t let your guard down when the trumpets go off. Above all, don’t cheat. If you’re going to cheat, make sure you have a damn good reason for it, because otherwise the price is going to be higher than the benefits.”

Katniss sits up. 

“Yes,” says the ghost. “I died sixty-five years ago. I’m a murderer. I’ve had decades to think about that. I suggest you get over it.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” she says. “You talk like you were a Tribute.”

He shrugs. “I suppose, in a sense, I was.”

“But you’re Capitol.”

The ghost smiles, showing white teeth and pointed incisors. “What makes you think the people annually killing off children give a damn about their own? It was a one-time-only occasion. Twenty-four Capitol Mentors for Twenty-four Tributes. Double the children.”

“But Mentors don’t go into the Arena.”

“Again, the assumption that the Games are limited to the Arena is a dangerously false one. Get rid of it.”

“They let you kill people outside of the Arena?”

“I never implied I got away scot-free. I’m dead, remember?”

“Is that how you died? In the Games? How did you die at the Hanging Tree if you died in the Games?”

“You always have the most annoying questions. I went to District 12. The Games followed me there. End of story.”

“If you were a Mentor, what happened to the Tribute you mentored?”

“Oh, she won. Clever girl, her.”

“You sound crazy.”

“Never claimed I wasn’t.”

They fall into a strangely comfortable silence.

“You think I can win this?” she asks.

“Sure,” he says. “Why not? Becoming a Victor isn’t complicated. It just takes luck. Well, luck and cheating, in my case.”

“What, are you saying you were a Victor?”

“Runner-up. Only took me sixty years to take my loss with grace. Death makes hindsight easier.”

Katniss falls back onto the bed. She closes her eyes. “I saved my sister.”

“You did. Well done. I’d never have been able to do that if it were my cousin.”

Katniss glances at his white rose. “Did you have a sibling?”

“I just said ‘cousin.’ Which part of that was difficult to understand?”

“No, you idiot. A sibling. Like a brother or sister.”

“I’m not an idiot. I’m the precise opposite. I’m exceptional.”

“Says the dead guy.”

“No,” he says, “I didn’t have a brother.”

Katniss supposes it was too silly to link this insufferable ghost to that bedtime story about a boy with a rose. “Are you ever going to tell me your name?”

“I don’t know, what do you think?”

“You’re insufferable.”

“When you win,” he says. “I’ll tell you my name when you come back from the Arena.”

Peeta Mellark is Reaped for the Hunger Games with the girl he loves.

His brothers didn’t volunteer for him. That’s normal. His parents don’t think he’s coming back. That’s normal too.

The ghost in his train compartment isn’t.

“Peeta,” says Lucy Gray, a depthless sadness in her eyes. “Peeta, I’m so sorry.”

“How can you be here?” he asks, half startled and half insanely grateful for the piece of home she provides.

“I can go where I went when I was alive,” says Lucy Gray. “I’ve been on these train tracks before.”

Peeta stares at her, the pieces falling into place. He first saw her on the Reaping podium. “You were a Tribute.”

“The Tenth Hunger Games,” she concedes.

Peeta licks his lips. “Did . . . how . . . .” He swallows. “Does everyone come back as ghosts?”

“Not as far as I know,” she says, soft and apologetic.

“Okay.” Peeta sits down on the bed. It’s obscenely comfortable. “Okay.”

“I know this feels like a death sentence,” she says, “believe me, I know. But would it really be that impossible for you to survive this?”

“What if I don’t want to survive this?” he says, looking at his hands.

“Oh, Peeta.”

“I love Katniss Everdeen,” he whispers, voicing his oldest secret for the first and possibly the last time.

Lucy Gray seems to freeze in time. Then, slowly, she crouches down in front of him. “Is that so,” she whispers.

Peeta nods, wordless.

“You know I think of you very dearly, Peeta. You remind me of a good friend, a brother to someone I once knew. I’m sorry, but I do have to ask—is there any way I can persuade you out of this?”

He thinks it’s ironic that the only person who cares whether he survives the Games or not is already dead.

He shakes his head once. He doesn’t want Katniss Everdeen to die.

Lucy Gray lets out a deep sigh. “Alright.” She straightens up. “I guess the only thing left to do is to figure out what you want your last hurrah to look like.”

Peeta already knows. He doesn’t want Katniss Everdeen to die. He’s going to die protecting her.

He’s absolutely terrified.

“Personally,” says Lucy Gray, “I find that going to my death with dignity is easier if I own it.” She holds out a hand. “Will you dance with me tonight, dearest Peeta?”

Peeta puts his hand out in thin air. Lucy Gray pretends to kiss it.

She sings their favorite song.

> You can’t take my past.  
> You can’t take my history.  
> You could take my pa,  
> But his name’s a mystery.  
> Nothing you can take from me was ever worth keeping.

“You’re going to be unforgettable,” Lucy Gray tells him.

He is so, so grateful for her company.

* * *

Coriolanus Snow doesn’t bother trying to follow the girl off the train. Both the Tributes’ quarters and the new Arena were built well after his time.

He was here forty-five years ago. He retraced his steps through drastically changed streets and took a long walk through his old family home. He didn’t find a clue as to where Tigris may be, if she’s even still alive.

He has no wish to step foot in the Capitol again.

Instead he watches one of the readily-available television screens for interview footages of the girl. She’s made a generically pretty personality for herself. It isn’t hers, but she wears it well.

Her District partner, though. That boy knows how to charm. He knows how to make plebeians dance to his tune. He constructs an entire persona around a love confession and plays with his interview crowd like they’re putty in his hands. That boy is dangerous.

_Don’t trust him_ , Coriolanus thinks, watching the Seventy-Fourth Hunger Games through digital screens. Years have passed since his own death, but here he is again, behind a monitor, this time with no way to influence the outcome. He locks away the memories with special care.

The Gamemakers have become much more creative. He sees Dr. Gaul— _no, she’s President Gaul now_ —he sees her handiwork in the wasps and the wolves. The fear that spikes through him is an automatic reaction. If he walked to the labs, would she—no, that would be pointless, he needs to stop.

He experiences a moment of true shock when the little child from District 11 dies and the girl buries her in flowers. He sees someone else in the fingers that sprinkle petals over the body. He hears someone else when she sings about a meadow safe from harm. He shatters apart from the broken dam of memories and has to reconstruct himself with a desperation he thought he’d forgotten.

His delusions are starting up again, he’s certain of it. What he’s projecting onto her, it’s not real. None of it is real.

_Don’t trust him_ , he thinks, truly and honestly afraid, as he watches the girl who reminds him of Tigris fall in love on the national murder event of the year.

Lucy Gray Baird hasn’t stepped foot on Capitol soil for sixty-five years. If it wasn’t for Peeta, she definitely wouldn’t be here. She hates every brick and stone of this city. She’s always hated it.

She pushes the terrible memories into a corner and buries them. She may not be able to accompany Peeta into the Games, but he deserves to have someone mourn for him. She’s here to mourn his death.

True to her word, he is unforgettable. He is charming and intelligent. He spills the contents of his heart like they are proud jewels, and Lucy Gray thinks she recognizes that recklessness.

But the object of his affections—she’s absolutely riveting. She dresses in fire and embers. She spins for the cameras and the crowd falls in instant love. It’s impossible to look away from the Girl on Fire—her genuine love for the family she protected, her genuine surprise at the public love confession, and her song, her song, her song.

_That’s my song_ , Lucy Gray thinks, staring at the girl who sings for the dead child she buries in flowers. _That’s my act. That’s my song. That’s my poison_.

She wants to reach through the screens and pluck Peeta out from that cursed Arena. She thinks she might be going mad, eyes glued to the television screen, hunting for a glimpse of the boy she watched grow up. She has never felt so ensnared by the world of the living since her death. This is a wholly foreign cocktail of hope and fear that she hasn’t experienced before.

_Is this what you felt_ , she wonders for a split second, then brutally shoves the thought out of her head.

_Don’t trust her_ , she thinks, searching the Girl on Fire for any hint that she might mean her declarations of love.

_Don’t trust her_ , she thinks, even as the two children raise poison to their lips and the trumpets announce them the Victors of the Seventy-Fourth Hunger Games.

* * *

Katniss is reeling.

“The President knows,” she gasped, panic filling her chest with stones. “She knows it was fake, she _knows_ , what—what the fuck am I supposed to—”

She locked the doors to her train compartment, but she has never felt less safe. The look on Peeta’s face when she told him it was all part of the Game had been—oh, she’s definitely fucked this up, this is unsalvageable, they’re going to kill her, they might kill her family too, fuck, _Prim_ —

“Why are you asking me?” says an icy voice. “Snap out of it. What the hell did you expect? I told you, when you cheat, make sure it’s goddamn worth it. Was it worth it?”

Katniss stares at the ghost, disoriented and scared out of her bones. “What?”

“Was it worth it?” presses the ghost, blue fire in his eyes.

Katniss thinks of Rue. She remembers the tributes she killed and the death sentence they gleefully slung around her neck.

She knows she wouldn’t have killed Peeta. She doesn’t think Peeta would’ve killed her. “It was the only option.”

“Then get your head on straight,” scorns the Capitol ghost. “The Game doesn’t end until we’re dead, those are the rules. You’re a Victor. Are you going to give up _now_ , after you condemned twenty-two others?”

“No,” she says. Her head is starting to cool.

“That’s right.” The ghost gives her a crooked smirk. “Congratulations, you survived the Arena. It shouldn’t be too hard to sell the remainder of your life’s story for your family’s continued survival, right?”

“Right,” she says, even while her heart clenches at the thought of Peeta’s pained expression.

Peeta is . . . he thinks he’s in pain.

“She never loved me."

“Oh, Peeta.” Lucy Gray crouches down to meet his eyes. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.” It doesn’t feel okay, but surely it will pass.

What he isn’t sure _will_ pass, though . . . .

He says, “I’m a Victor.”

No, that’s not the right way to say it.

“I’m a murderer.”

Lucy Gray hesitates, and for a second Peeta is terrified of her condemnation. Then she says, “I was the Victor of the Tenth Hunger Games.”

Peeta stares at her.

“I killed four people,” says Lucy Gray. “I’m a murderer, too.”

Peeta doesn’t know what he should say. Should he console her? Thank her for her honesty?

“It isn’t impossible,” Lucy Gray tells him. “You can survive this.”

“But not as me,” Peeta says.

The ghost’s smile is sad. “No. A part of us dies when the cameras first catch us. But that’s all right. They can't have all of us.”

_Can't they?_ Peeta wonders.

When Lucy Gray offers her hand, Peeta pretends he can touch something made of thin air.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Sang the songbird: share my perch_   
>  _Upon this mount of visions_   
>  _Fellow me with songs beyond haruspications;_   
>  _Come, share with me your own songs_   
>  _And let’s incline our ears to each other._
> 
> \- Tade Ipadeola


	2. Roses

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reader discretion advised. Heed the tags.

Once upon a time, a boy and a girl ran away into the woods. They were running from a gruesome game of death. The boy had just traded away his brother’s life for his own. The girl knew what he had weighed—trust against survival. She knew what he had chosen.

They were clinging to shredded masks. _There can only be one victor._ That was the Game’s rule.

The girl hid herself in the rain. The boy chased after her, a gun in his hands. He found her orange scarf draped over the briars of a rose bush.

He smiled in relief as he reached for her token, the clue she had left him. To his eyes it meant, _Trust me. Follow me_.

He said, “Lucy Gray.”

In another world, the boy thought her the prey, and the girl thought him human. In another world, she tested him with a venomless snake, and he failed the test spectacularly.

But in this world, in this moment, he still thought her his lover—and she had already decided.

The snake bit his forearm. He screamed.

(Not so different, these two worlds. Just a matter of who played their hand first.)

It took five minutes for the boy to crawl to the edge of the woods, delirious from the venom. He died at the base of the gallows that grew on the screams of the condemned.

For as long as she lived, no one would call the girl by her name again.

* * *

Haymitch Abernathy wakes from his years-long, self-imposed alcoholic fugue state when the two children he’s ferrying to their deaths break his liquor glass and drive a dinner knife between his fingers.

Dark-haired girl. Blue-eyed boy.

He chooses the girl. The boy is a decent person. The girl’s a survivor. She has better chances. But wonder of wonders, they both cheat their way out of the Arena. Haymitch can’t decide whether he should be celebrating this outcome or drinking himself into a coma.

When they announce the Quarter Quell, he goes for the latter option.

“You owe me,” says the boy, sitting himself down at the kitchen table like he belongs there. “You chose her over me in the first Games, so you owe me this. Please, Haymitch.”

“Whatever he wants, it’s his turn to be saved,” says the girl, pretending her hands aren’t shaking as she takes a bottle for herself. “We both owe him that. Please, Haymitch.”

Katniss Everdeen. Peeta Mellark.

He shouldn’t have done this. He shouldn’t have learned them as he did. He shouldn’t have grown used to the boy bringing over cheese rolls and the girl tracking in dirt on her hunting boots. He shouldn’t feel this attached to them. He shouldn’t care this much.

He chooses the girl. She tries to claw his eyes out when she learns of what he did, screaming like a wild thing. He screams right back, angry at her for being the Girl on Fire, angry that she’s spitting the terrible words he doesn’t have the courage to say to himself.

The first time he catches sight of the boy on Capitol broadcasts, paper-white and shaking as he recites propaganda . . . well, Haymitch thinks he would’ve truly killed himself this time, if there wasn’t still a girl he was charged with keeping alive.

* * *

Katniss Everdeen is reaped for the Quarter Quell. Coriolanus watches the Games through the screens, same as last year, trying not to let a single detail pass him by and hoping against reason it will end like last year.

It doesn’t.

She didn’t decide her allies. She didn’t decide the plan, though she did fire the last shot. The logical conclusion is that she was betrayed by her Mentor.

She was supposed to be able to trust her Mentor.

Maybe he should’ve seen this coming.

He can’t follow the girl where she was taken, so instead he wanders the nooks and crannies of the Capitol for a week after, collecting whispers and studying the routes often taken by harried assistants. Then he steels himself and walks into the Citadel.

He finds the boy in the catacombs of the labs.

* * *

Peeta Mellark volunteers for the Quarter Quell. Lucy Gray has to watch him enter the Arena for the second time. His mentor squeezes his eyes shut when the announcer reads his name from the ballot, and Lucy Gray wonders with a rising sense of dread, _What are you guilty for?_

Peeta’s mentor leaves him behind to die.

She is devastated by the betrayal, but she knows she is in no place to judge Haymitch Abernathy.

Peeta disappears, taken where she can’t reach. Try as she might, she cannot deviate from the paths they dragged her through in chains.

There is nothing she loathes more than this city, this stone-cobbled nightmare of candy houses and jeweled snakes. She can’t stand another minute of this barbaric place. Sixty-five years, and nothing has changed. She is still utterly helpless against the monster that devours its children.

So she runs. She returns to District 12.

She finds the girl amidst the bones and ashes of their homeland.

* * *

_My name is Katniss Everdeen. I am seventeen years old. I was in the Hunger Games. My home is District 12._

_There is no District 12._

A ghost is waiting for her on the ashy streets of her home. It’s not the boy with the rose. It’s a ghost she doesn’t know—a girl with rainbow-ruffled skirts and dark curls that gleam like the pointed end of a newly sharpened charcoal pencil.

“Oh,” says the ghost, and the girl has to be a ghost because none of Katniss’s companions take notice of her. They are all trying not to offend the dead bodies on the street with their blatantly mobile state of alive-ness.

“You can see me,” says the ghost, and she sounds very sad about this fact.

Katniss walks past her.

Katniss is dreaming of the dead every night. This shouldn’t be new. She doesn’t know why this ghost unsettles her so much.

Maybe it’s because she thought she would be safe from ghosts in her waking world, at least—and here comes this ghost, a condensed vision of all the people of Twelve who died because Katniss Everdeen was the Mockingjay, who stares at her with something knowing in her eyes.

Katniss wonders if the ghost is a hallucination. She wonders when she grew so afraid of ghosts.

They were hiding Peeta’s propos from her. She touches his face through the screen and thinks, achingly, _You’re alive_.

When Katniss returns to District 12 to film another propo, the ghost is there. The ghost trails after them as they hike to the lake, humming a tune that Katniss refuses to recognize.

Pollux asks her to sing. Katniss does. Everyone around her is silent as the mockingjays echo the tune and make it their own. The living are looking at the birds. The dead is looking at her.

When they’re ready to return to the hovercraft, the ghost drifts up to Katniss’s side.

She says, “You have a lovely voice." Katniss ignores her.

In Thirteen, it is Peeta’s broadcast they interrupt with her propos, and every cheer that goes up amongst the rebel audience makes her progressively sicker. They’re not going to forgive him for her. She is destroying him with this.

“No one is safe,” he gasps, physically laboring through the words, addressing her, speaking to _her_. “And you . . . in Thirteen . . . dead by morning!”

District 13 survives thanks to his warning. Katniss watches Prim’s stupid cat struggle to catch an elusive flashlight beam and realizes his destruction is meant to break her.

It is working.

In the deepest hours of the night, when sane people are breathing the deep breaths of restful sleep, Katniss is awake to see a rainbow-ruffled skirt pick its way through the crowd toward her.

Maybe this is a new kind of nightmare.

She sits up in her bedroll. She meets the gaze of the ghost of Twelve head-on. She is too tired to run.

“Hello again,” says the ghost, sounding sad.

Katniss nods.

“May I?” the ghost asks, gesturing to a spot of ground next to the bedroll.

Katniss nods again.

“How are you doing?” asks the hallucination, after she settles herself into an artful perch of colorful skirts. Katniss nearly laughs at the question. How is she _doing?_

“Maybe that was too forward of me,” says the ghost, peering at her expression. “I suppose I haven’t introduced myself yet, have I? My name is Lucy Gray Baird. It’s nice to meet you.”

The name means nothing to her.

The ghost sweeps her hands over her ruffles, pretending to be at ease. “The song you sang at the lake. It was beautifully sung.” She hesitates. “Can I ask how you know it?”

Katniss thinks her subconscious is asking very strange questions. “My father,” she whispers, because why not? She already knows the answer to this.

“Oh. That’s interesting.”

“He’s dead.”

“I’m very sorry for your loss,” says the ghost, perfectly formal in a way that indicates she’s said this many times before.

Katniss wonders what this nightmare is trying to accuse her of.

Then the ghost says, “It’s my song, you see.”

It is the last thing Katniss expected to hear.

“I performed it only once.” The ghost seems to be gazing through an interminable distance. “But Maude Ivory always did have a knack for remembering my songs.”

The ghost is creepy, but not in a way that makes her want to scream. So when the ghost says, “You look like you could use a distraction,” Katniss lets her tell her stories.

The ghost tells her about a traveling band of musicians who settled because they had to. She tells her about a war-torn country and the woods full of mockingbirds and Jabberjays. She tells her about the different kinds of snakes that lived in the woods, and where you had to go to find the ones that could be persuaded not to bite.

The ghost tells her stories like she needs someone to know them, like she lost the person she would tell them to and is making do with Katniss.

The night is long. The ghost runs out of stories to tell, so she moves on to songs. She sings her entire repertoire. Katniss is surprised to hear songs she doesn’t know. Her subconscious is grasping for all kinds of nonexistent creativity with this dream.

Eventually, the ghost stops singing. But still the dream is not over.

So Katniss asks. “You said ‘The Hanging Tree’ is yours.”

“I did.”

“Tell me how.” She wants to know why the hanged man is calling for his lover to follow him. This is suddenly important to her.

And so the ghost tells her a story about an execution. A man who died calling for a woman to flee. The woman, captured and locked away. A Peacekeeper who tried to save her, but was betrayed and hanged alongside the convicted.

“Are you the woman who was hanged?” Katniss asks.

“No,” says the ghost.

“So how is this your song?”

“I composed it.”

“You didn’t tell me you composed it. You told me it was yours.” She is testing her subconscious for courage she doesn’t have. Katniss dares her. “How?”

To her surprise, the ghost answers.

The story starts at a point when things are already falling apart. There was a boy she was going to run away with. Things went wrong, and she realized the boy was not who she’d thought he was.

The ghost is very vague about the circumstances. The story is short.

“That’s it?” Katniss asks.

Lucy Gray Baird has an unfathomable expression on her face. “No.”

Katniss thinks this surliness is the most honesty she has seen from this ghost. “So how does it end?”

“I killed him.”

Katniss thinks about this. She studies the ghost more closely.

She doesn’t know what tips her off, but there is a particular edge to Victors that she has become familiar with. It’s an expectation. It’s an anger. It’s a self-composed knowledge; _I have killed to be here_.

“You were in the Games,” says Katniss. She supposes this is apt, considering the ghost is her subconscious. It still takes her off guard.

“Did you not expect that?” asks the ghost.

Katniss shakes her head. She thought the ghost was supposed to be a symbol of the dead she doesn’t know. Victors are a species she knows intrinsically.

Oh.

This is a nightmare after all.

“Are you going to tell me to kill Peeta?” she asks, a terrible weight in her stomach.

The ghost’s eyes go wide. “Why would I do that?”

“You just told me you killed your district partner.”

“He wasn’t my district partner,” says the ghost.

“So what was he?” Katniss thinks over the lyrics of the song. “Your lover?”

“No.” The ghost’s answer is automatic and firm.

Katniss decides she didn’t want to know anyway. The ghost is too much like her.

People are stirring from their cots. Soon the clocks will say it’s morning, and the absence of sunlight won’t make it untrue.

The ghost climbs to her feet and makes a show of dusting off her ruffled skirt. “Well,” she says, slightly awkward. “I’ll be going, now.”

Katniss nods. She hesitates. “Thanks.”

The ghost smiles gently, and she is unexpectedly beautiful. “You’re welcome, Katniss.”

When the ghost is gone, Katniss waits for the dream to end. It takes her an hour to realize she was never asleep.

They take her up to the surface to film the wreckage left by the bombs. Soon enough, the world is crashing down around her again, too fast and violent for her to stand.

* * *

Peeta is strapped to a lab table. He is naked and filthy and in a terrible amount of pain. Johanna is screaming shrilly in the next cell. He has enough faculty of mind left to recognize that the latest venom injection has worked halfway through his veins, but logic can’t stand against the mutts that come out of the shadows to tear him and his loved ones to pieces.

“Katniss,” he gasps the cursed name when she slinks toward him in the dark.

“Oh, good, you’re back,” says a familiar voice. Peeta spares a glance at the Capitol boy—a lab assistant, he surmises—who seems to be a recurring character in his splintering reality.

“She’s a mutt,” Peeta says. He doesn’t expect the Capitol assistant to understand him.

“Why is she a mutt?” the Capitol assistant asks him. He sounds bored. Or maybe he’s tired. Who cares what he is.

Peeta frowns at the question, though. Why? There is no ‘why,’ there is only fact. “She’s killing everyone.”

Katniss Everdeen now stands over his face. Her nails grow into long, pointed hooks. She digs them into his stomach and he gasps at the sharp, wrenching pain.

“I’m going to kill you,” Peeta promises, his breath coming in agonized bursts as she digs his intestines out.

“Why are you going to kill her?” asks the Capitol assistant. He’s a faint blur in the corner of Peeta’s eyes. The rest is all her, her, her.

“Because she’s a mutt,” Peeta answers, even as he wonders why he’s bothering to entertain one of his torturers. Katniss is snipping the tendons in his spasming legs. “Because she’s killing me.”

“And why is that a bad thing?”

Peeta struggles to understand. Katniss is slicing his mouth into flopping slivers of meat. “What?”

“Why are you angry that she’s killing you?”

Peeta thinks through the pain of his fingers being methodically severed at the knuckles. “Because she betrayed me.”

“Right. Betrayal. Remind me how betrayal works?”

Peeta stares at the Capitol assistant.

“You loved her,” says the boy.

“No,” says Peeta. An unnameable fury rises in his chest. “No, I hate her! I hate her!” He screams at the monster drilling her nails into his skull. “I hate you! I’ll kill you! You’re a mutt, Katniss Everdeen! I’ll kill you!”

Reality flies apart into an indistinguishable haze of pain and hatred. An eternity passes. His throat is bleeding from his screams.

Time loses meaning.

Peeta is strapped to a lab table. He is in terrible pain. A familiar Capitol assistant is standing in his cell. Katniss Everdeen emerges from the shadows to kill him.

“Katniss,” he says. He tastes blood.

“Alright, let’s try this again,” says the Capitol torturer.

“Leave me alone,” Peeta says, even though he knows it’s pointless to ask a torturer for privacy. Katniss proceeds to splice the bones from his body, starting from his one remaining foot.

“I’ll remind you that you asked me to do this,” says the Capitol assistant. “I don’t pretend to understand your reasons. So, Katniss Everdeen is trying to kill you.”

Finally, someone gets it. “Yes.”

“And you’re angry that she betrayed you.”

Peeta keens as Katniss punctures his lungs with her teeth. “Yes,” he gasps.

“Remind me, what’s the requirement for betrayal?”

Peeta stares at the Capitol boy. Katniss is gnawing on his neck.

“There must have been something before it was broken. That’s how betrayal works.” The boy speaks very slowly, as if he’s waiting for Peeta to understand. “You trusted her.”

A terrible realization strikes Peeta. The Capitol torturer is right. “I trusted her.”

“You wanted to protect her because you trusted her, but she betrayed you.”

“Yes,” Peeta agrees, even as Katniss excavates his heart from his chest.

“I’m glad you agree. Now, are you a mutt like her, or are you someone better?”

“I’m not a mutt,” Peeta says, then screams as Katniss wrenches his torso wide open, snapping his ribs in quick succession so that he’s laid out like a gruesome feast.

The Capitol torturer hesitates for the barest second. “A mutt betrays. Are you a mutt?”

“No,” Peeta gasps. The breath escapes his lungs in a silent scream.

“I’m not a mutt,” Peeta repeats, mouthing the words, speaking to no one. _I’m not a mutt_.

He has heard things. He has negotiated small favors from pitying attendants even as he was shoved onstage for scripted interviews. When President Gaul drags him into a televised interview, Peeta glares into the cameras and hollers his defiance: “Dead by morning!”

They torture him for an eternity before masked soldiers pull him off the lab table. It is the most natural thing to wake up to Katniss Everdeen’s face staring down at him.

He locks his fingers around her throat.

* * *

They tell him District 12 was burned to the ground. They tell him his family is all dead.

They keep him in chains and tell him he is sick and untrustworthy.

Peeta doesn’t trust them, but it is hard not to notice how everyone eyes him like he’s a rabid dog.

There’s a ghost in Thirteen. No one else seems to be able to see her. She sits in his room and sings vaguely familiar songs.

Peeta remembers her after a month. “Lucy Gray,” he says, and there are probably doctors listening in on him who are checking off the ‘hallucinations’ section off their insanity checklist, but he doesn’t care, he remembers her, he remembers that song—

Lucy Gray smiles. Her voice is only slightly watery. “Peeta.”

Being alive gets a little easier, after that.

“They say I loved her.”

“They do,” Lucy Gray concedes.

Peeta searches for a reaction. “Was it true?”

“You did tell me you loved her. Do you remember if it was true?”

He turns his head away. “I don’t know.”

“Emotions are difficult to categorize for me,” she says idly, brushing out her curls with her fingers. She does this, volunteers truths when he has none for himself. “I knew a boy I thought I loved.”

He waits for her to elaborate. She doesn’t.

He succumbs to curiosity. “Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Love him.”

“I don’t know.” She grins conspiratorially. “I’m not sure if I’ll ever know.”

“My family is dead.”

“Yes,” says Lucy Gray. She sounds very sad.

Peeta doesn’t feel sad. He thinks he should.

“I can’t remember their names,” he says.

“That’s all right."

“Is it?”

“I don’t remember my family’s faces,” says Lucy Gray.

Oh.

“It’s okay,” she says. “It doesn’t mean we loved them less.”

He thinks there’s a difference between forgetting a face and forgetting a name.

Come to think of it, he can’t remember any faces either.

The only memory he has left is the hot ache in his cheek and the slight burn on his hands.

He wonders if they let him keep it because it had Katniss Everdeen in it. If they left it alone because a hopeful beginning makes the disastrous ending that much worse.

The only thing he remembers about his family is the slap on his face and the goddamned bread.

The grief hits.

He cries for a dead boy and his dead family.

* * *

_My name is Katniss Everdeen. I am seventeen years old._

_There are too many people dead under my banner._

Everything is screaming in her dreams.

Maybe when she kills Gaul. Maybe then she’ll be able to sleep.

She finds the ghost— _her_ ghost—at the edges of the rebel encampment, rooted like a post near the Capitol’s train station. She nearly breaks into a run to reach him.

“Where have you been?” she demands, unable to hide the note of relief in her voice.

“I should be asking you that,” he snips back. “It’s not like you left me a tearful parting note.”

They grin at each other like idiots.

“You look awful,” he tells her.

“And you’re still dead.”

“Haven’t lost your charm, I see.”

She is too glad to see him. He lessens her guilt. He’s been dead for as long as she’s known him. She didn’t kill him, and she doesn’t have to worry about ever killing him.

It is easier to remember how to be who she wants to be—cynical, practical, _sane_ —when she is sniping and complaining with him.

She trains. She sleeps. She is holding on.

Then Coin sends her Peeta, and she is plummeting again.

She finds a secluded corner to wait. The ghost comes to find her.

“Your district partner is here,” he remarks, like he’s talking about the weather.

“They want me dead,” she says, voicing the obvious.

“That’s certainly new.”

She glares at him.

“He’s not the worst thing you’ve survived,” the ghost says, placating.

“I’m not going to _fight_ him,” she snaps, uncertain of herself even as she says it.

The ghost shoves his hands into his pockets. “You said he tried to strangle you.”

“The Capitol tortured him.”

“He did try to kill you.”

She doesn’t understand why he’s arguing with her on this. “He wasn’t himself!”

“But what if that _is_ him, now? Look, I’m just laying out the facts.”

She doesn’t want to hear this, not when she’s whispering the same doubts in the back of her mind. “What the fuck would you know about it, anyway?”

The ghost opens his mouth, then closes it.

Her anger is snuffed out. She knows, instinctively, that she’s touched on something personal. “Explain.”

“You don’t want to know what I think about this.”

“But you excel at giving unwanted opinions.”

“You really won’t like this one.”

Katniss waits.

“They turned me into a mutt.” He doesn’t look at her when he speaks. “They didn’t even need to use torture. I went willingly, like a dumb beast driven by base instincts.”

So he was Capitol. She tells herself she already knew that. She forces her voice to stay level. “So?”

“There was a girl. She killed me.” He flicks her a glance. “I told you, you won’t like this.”

She recalls what he told her—the Tribute he mentored won his Games.

A deep chill settles over her. “You think I should kill him.”

The ghost shifts uncomfortably. “He’s not me. I’m not recommending anything. But it would be simpler, it’s true.”

Katniss is struck by inexplicable fury. “You don’t tell me who to kill!” She wishes she could punch him. “ _Nobody_ is going to tell me who to fucking kill!”

“For the record,” the ghost says to her as she storms off, “I think she made the right call.”

* * *

Katniss Everdeen's team of Victors and camera crew ventures into the Capitol. The traps go off, the candy-colored streets are full of deadly things, and soon neither the Capitol nor the rebels know where the Mockingjay is. It’s good for morale, at least for the rebels. The girl has a knack for unwittingly setting people aflame with conviction.

Coriolanus retraces every step he ever took in the Capitol. He’s dead and useless, so he’s not even sure why he’s searching for her, but surely an invisible spy could be useful to the girl.

He finds her in the cellars of what used to be Pluribus Bell’s store. He drifts past a woman who looks more tiger than human, sitting vigil on the counter aboveground. For a second, as her slitted feline eyes slide over him, he could have sworn the woman saw him. But the moment ends too quickly for it to have been real, and he descends the stairs to find Katniss Everdeen asleep on the ratty couch.

He’s still useless, but he tries to hiss advice about how to blend into the Capitol crowd. He tries to shout a warning before the gunfire starts. He tries to warn her, a terrible possibility blooming in his mind, but she’s already pushing through the crowd, screaming for her sister.

Katniss Everdeen goes up in flames.

He waits for her to wake up.

She stumbles through the grand mansion that is her place of recovery, speechless and grieving. She barely notices him as he drifts behind her. He knows he wouldn’t be able to stop her if she choked on her pills. He wishes he could do something besides making useless comments that don’t reach her.

He has waited sixty-five years for a purpose to his existence, and the one person who can see him can no longer hear him. It is time to come to terms with the truth—he is, and has always been, an utterly meaningless failure.

This hurts a lot more than he expected it would.

He realizes he’s been as out of it as she has been when he finally notices which grand mansion is housing them.

It’s like he’s in a trance. It’s like the last sixty-something years are being undone. He drifts across the street to what had once been the Snow family house. He hesitates on the front steps. Then he walks through the doors, unnoticed by the stone-faced guards.

The house is changed. He doesn’t know what about it feels so wrong, but the severe furniture and the tinted windows are not helping. It looks as though the place has been more or less conserved, but there are unexplainable cages and glass tanks in every room. His childhood home has somehow been turned inside out. He barely recognizes the kitchen where he and Tigris once planned their future—the table has the unnatural stains and burn marks of being used as a makeshift lab.

There are too many armed guards walking this place. He wants to scream at them to get out, this is his home, they have no _right_ —

But what he discovers in the greenhouse that once held roses—it might the worst thing he’s ever seen.

The greenhouse is devoid of his grandmother’s roses. Instead, glass tanks line the entirety of the space, generously decorated with rocks and sticks that he recognizes to be artificial habitats for reptiles.

In the center of this fogged-glass hall sits Volumnia Gaul.

Her gaze pins him to the dissection board. “Mr. Snow,” rasps the ex-President of Panem. “What a pleasant surprise.”

There are manacles on her wrists, but she has been provided with a comfortable chair. She looks impossibly old. Her hair is white. Her face is dominated by wrinkles.

She gasps on a cough. She might be laughing at him. “Welcome to my home.”

He takes a step back. He can’t speak.

“Do you like what I’ve done with the place?” she asks, and she is definitely laughing at his terror now.

The glass tanks. The reptile habitats.

There are fangs in his arm and venom under his skin. The phantom pain tries to snatch him out of reality. His grandmother’s greenhouse is melting into Gaul’s office—her desk and her terrarium and her jewel-colored snakes that made Clemensia scream.

His house of roses has been transformed into her house of snakes. She captured his home and violated what he loved, thoroughly destroyed every last bit of what he had touched and held as his.

Why, why, _why?_

Because he defied her. Because he fell in love with someone he shouldn’t have loved and died by a hand that wasn’t hers.

She has no right to his home. But this isn’t his home anymore—this is hers, and he’s the trespasser.

He takes another step back. He needs—oh god, why is she _here_ , why has she followed him, he’s _dead_ , he’s supposed to be _free_ from her—why, _why_ , why can’t he—

“Don’t run from me,” hisses the woman, and his feet freeze in place. His mind remembers her, remembers the gut-wrenching fear that accompanies her.

A ghost doesn’t need to breathe, which is the only reason he doesn’t descend into breathless panic on the spot. _I’m dead_ , he tells himself, _she can’t kill me again_. But that isn’t true, because hasn’t she done just that? She’s killed him again, wiped away every sign of him from the last place he was Coryo—and if she did it once, she can do it again.

Oh god, _Tigris_.

“Would you like to know what happened to your cousin?” Gaul rasps, reptilian eyes gleaming, reading him as easily as she had when he was alive.

It’s been over sixty years, but this woman still holds the noose around his neck.

“Come closer,” she tells him, and he obeys.

She examines his face. Asks, “Are you a supernatural phenomenon or a creation of my own mind?”

He doesn’t have the words to answer her. He is incapable of speech, struck silent by shock and grief and fear.

It doesn’t seem to matter to her, whether he’s real or not. She’s pleased to see him. She tells him everything. How she bought the Snow house and made it her own. How she watched Tigris struggle as a stylist and fall behind, more tiger than human. How she built the Games on his ideas. How the system was a near-perfect thing.

He can’t muster any reactions. His mind has been wiped clean of everything but her words. Even the small, whispering revelation about Tigris—he may have passed her by without recognizing her—is buried under Gaul’s stories.

She gives him everything. She wants him to remember her like this—clever, powerful, not truly defeated.

“It’s a pity, this war,” she sighs, ancient and elegant, “but I suppose it had to happen sometime. Clever woman, that Coin. Those bombs turned every last person in Panem away from me. Wish I’d thought of that—playing on pity! Pure genius.”

It’s like the world reorients itself. His vision flipped upside down when he first saw her, and now his world flips again. Right-side up? Who knows. Who cares.

The bomb that killed Primrose Everdeen was from District 13.

“A funny trick,” Gaul says, “I’ll give them that. As I always like to say, we humans are an inherently evil breed. We exceed our own expectations.”

He takes a shuddering breath, surfacing from his own silence. He has never felt more insubstantial than when he says, “I don’t believe you.”

Gaul smiles, a gruesome, bloody thing. “Oh, my dear Mr. Snow. I thought I had taught you not to lie to me.”

It’s true. She did.

His head suddenly clears.

He’s dead, but he knows someone who’s still alive. He knows a girl who will want to know this.

“Would you like to hear about the Plinths?” Gaul asks.

“No,” he says, because he attended their funeral forty-five years ago. He already knows where they are buried.

His world has flipped so many times that he doesn’t know which way is up anymore, but he thinks right now he’s right-side up, and he doesn’t know how long it will last, but he is right-side up. He is right-side up.

_Are you a mutt?_

He doesn’t want another Gaul to rule Panem.

Coriolanus Snow turns his back on his creator. He leaves.

* * *

Lucy Gray hasn’t walked the Capitol’s streets. She is unable to accompany Peeta on his dangerous trek through his final Arena.

Peeta Mellark burns in the fire that nearly kills both Everdeen sisters.

Lucy Gray knows how much he hates hospital wards. She tries to stay by his side as much as she can. It’s a good thing they’re keeping him in the hospital that held her after her own Games.

He has no family left to visit him. His mentor comes to sit in a chair and watch him sleep. His mentor is the one to tell him what happened—the war is over and people are dead.

Peeta doesn’t cry. Lucy Gray almost wishes he would.

He doesn’t speak to her. She doesn’t break his silence. She keeps him company and hopes it means something.

On the day of the ex-President’s execution, Peeta is called to a special meeting for Victors. Lucy Gray drifts outside, heading for the streets. She has a prior engagement.

The prison car holding Gaul takes a roundabout parade route along Capitol streets. People are lined up to gawk and jeer at the beast who ate their children on the altar they built.

Lucy Gray has been waiting for this moment. As the truck trundles by, she drifts straight through its armored walls.

The sole occupant of the airtight container is an ancient woman in handcuffs. Her hair is impossibly white. She does not blink when Lucy Gray enters.

“Hello,” says Lucy Gray. “Do you remember me?”

This woman stood over her as they wrestled her to the ground, searching for proof that Coriolanus Snow had cheated the Games. In Lucy Gray’s memories, this woman is a predator in her prime, her snake eyes empty and thoroughly disinterested in prey already tamed.

The snake eyes are unchanged, but this time, they hold a pointed hatred that would’ve chilled her to the bone, if she had still been alive.

“You,” Gaul spits, venomous.

“Me,” Lucy Gray agrees. “How does it feel to be paraded to your execution?”

“You have doomed this country,” Gaul hisses. “I had a perfect successor. He was unparalleled.”

Lucy Gray doesn’t understand why this old woman is discussing succession. She had no children.

Then Lucy Gray remembers how this woman smiled when they found a rose-scented compact in her pockets.

“He would’ve made Panem greater, if you hadn’t interfered,” says Gaul, glaring daggers. “Now the rabble will tear itself apart, with no one to keep their foul base instincts in check. Your selfishness cost this civilization a guide they should’ve had.”

“My selfishness?” Lucy Gray considers. “Oh. You’re talking about how I killed him.”

“Do you know how difficult it is to find a mind like his?” Gaul snaps. “Sixty-five years, and not one of the disgusting domesticated pigs waddling around this city was anything close to Coriolanus Snow.”

“You sent me into an Arena to die,” says Lucy Gray, in a mild voice. “Do you remember that part? Or are you too senile to stop gibbering about a dead boy?”

“You survived,” says Gaul, waving her off. “It’s a pity Coriolanus didn’t kill you. I thought he would. Don’t know why he didn’t.”

“Because I was better.” Lucy Gray determinedly refuses to think about the hopeful lilt in his voice as he called her name for the last time, moments before reaching into a rose bush to touch her orange scarf—his trust winning over his exceptional mind.

“You’re certainly a cold-blooded thing,” says Gaul thoughtfully, as if she is just noticing this.

“You realize that if he’d survived me, he would’ve killed you too,” Lucy Gray reminds her. “He hated you.”

“No, he loved me.” Gaul smiles, and it is a terrible, spasming facade. “Poor orphaned child, he thought of me as a mother.”

“He had a mother.” Lucy Gray checks herself against her rising anger. She remembers how he held the rose-scented compact, cautious and loving. “You’re not her.”

Gaul shrugs. “Children forget so easily. As for the certain death I was risking with his education, well, that is the duty of educators, isn’t it? The student must slay the mentor before they can move forward.”

Lucy Gray lets out a small sound of disbelief. “Did you murder your own teacher, too?”

“Of course. He was an excellent instructor.”

Lucy Gray doesn’t know what she expected from this woman. “You’re insane.”

“And you killed my son.” Gaul peers at her. “You were playing so well, you know. Made him hand you everything you wanted. What I don’t understand is why you wanted to keep him, after his use was spent. You should have let him return to me. I would’ve let you live out your days to the natural end of your life.”

“He wasn’t a trophy,” Lucy Gray says, trying to stay calm.

“Don’t lie to me, girl,” snaps Gaul. “It was a game with clear rules.”

“It wasn’t a fucking game!”

“Language,” tuts the woman.

Lucy Gray wanted to see what this monster looked like defeated. Only now does she realize that the monster doesn’t think she is defeated. Death is merely an inconvenience to her. This woman’s theory—that humans are meant to slaughter each other, that killing is the only thing they have learned—is going to be proven through her own execution. This isn’t a loss to her. This is providence.

Lucy Gray wants to see her lose.

“You talk big for a philosopher whose beliefs will die with her,” she tells the woman.

Gaul’s face contorts. “There will be others. There are always others.”

“But not a successor,” Lucy Gray points out. “Because I claimed him before you could.”

“You killed him because you couldn’t make him bend,” hisses the snake.

“I killed him because he was _mine_ ,” Lucy Gray hisses back, dressed in rainbow, venom on her lips—and as she says it she startles to realize that though she killed to survive, the ownership, that was true. The jealousy was true.

The starburst of affection she felt in her chest when he first kissed her in Twelve—that was true.

Then she is lying through her teeth, injecting poison: “He was mine from the moment he gave me his rose. You never owned him, _I_ did, and I didn’t want you to have him. So I made sure you wouldn’t, and now your precious ideals will die with you.”

“You are vermin,” the monster snarls. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You must hate her,” says Lucy Gray, pushing forward. “The Mockingjay. The singing girl who burned your kingdom to the ground. Does she remind you of me?” She steps closer, leans in. Makes sure Gaul’s eyes are on her. “She should.”

Lucy Gray sings, a sharp burst of notes that reverberate around the metal box.

> Are you, are you  
> Coming to the tree?  
> Wear a necklace of rope, side by side with me.

Gaul’s expression is the rictus mask of a corpse.

 _It’s your turn to wear the necklace_ , Lucy Gray thinks.

“The girl who killed your precious empire has my song,” she whispers. “I gave her my songs. I gave her my voice. I gave her my poison.”

More lies. Katniss Everdeen’s fire is entirely hers. But the truth doesn’t matter to this single, senile spectator of Lucy Gray's final performance. Not anymore.

Her audience only has eyes for her.

“I stole your successor. I destroyed what you created. In five minutes, the girl with my song is going to put an end to you and the city you stood for. You have lost to me in every way that matters.” Lucy Gray smiles. “Thank you for playing, Volumnia Gaul. You have been a wholly underwhelming opponent.”

Gaul screams in rage.

* * *

Prim is dead.

Katniss has never expected much from her mother, so she doesn’t wonder if her mother blames her for this.

She does wonder if this half-dead state she’s in is supposed to be grief. She remembers grief being much louder than this.

Then again, sometimes silence is just as loud as screams.

A ghost she didn’t kill follows her around.

“It’s not your fault they healed you,” he says, throwaway careless.

“It is ridiculously egotistical to take responsibility for every single death that ever took place in this war,” he says, casually derisive.

“So you’re alive,” he says, “so what? What’s wrong with that?”

Mockingjay. Girl on Fire.

The face on the banner soldiers will die for.

Prim is dead.

Everything is wrong.

“It wasn’t your fault,” he says, quiet and desperate. “It was out of your hands. You didn’t fail her. She volunteered. You know that's a choice.”

This ghost has no right to talk about her sister.

People are whispering about Gaul’s trial and subsequent death sentence. The Mockingjay suit arrives in her room.

“Katniss,” says the ghost, the day before she is meant to execute Gaul. She habitually ignores him, but he is determined this time.

“When I was a child, I saw a man take the leg off a frozen corpse to take home for dinner. He lived across the street from me.” He points out the window. His hand is shaking. “I can’t forget that street. That house is where I lived with my cousin and my grandmother. I was just there. I saw Gaul. She could see me.”

She stares at him. He has her attention.

He tells her everything.

He has to be lying.

“Listen to me,” says her old dead friend. He sounds off-balance. He sounds scared. “You were watching Gaul, and Gaul was watching you. So who was watching Coin?”

Katniss shakes her head. Her sister is dead. Her District is dead. She can’t let this be true.

“Katniss Everdeen,” says the ghost. “Believe me when I say I am not lying to you.”

On the morning of the execution, President Coin proposes a final Hunger Games with Capitol children.

In the end, Victors are never more than a piece in the Games.

Katniss thinks of a boy from an old ghost story. The boy didn’t offer a key or a map to the girl behind bars. He offered a white rose.

He offered a question to the girl stripped of her choices.

For the first time since her sister’s death, Katniss speaks. “I vote yes.”

She is led to the stage of her final performance.

As she takes the single arrow from her quiver, Katniss glances at her ghostly companion. He stands beside her, where no living soul is permitted to approach. Gaul is staring at the ghost with a manic focus, but the ghost isn’t looking at Gaul. He’s looking at Coin.

_Believe me when I say I am not lying to you._

She believes him.

Katniss draws her bow, adjusts her aim, and releases the string. President Coin falls from the terrace with an arrow through her heart. Dead.

Gaul bursts into hysterical laughter. The world erupts.

The ghost turns his surprised eyes on her. “You shouldn’t have done that,“ he says, conflicting emotions flashing across his face. He knows what she’s gambled with—sanity against trust.

The ghost says, “Nice shot.”

She’s tempted to give him a theatrical bow.

The grey-uniformed guards swarm towards her. Katniss whispers goodnight to her bow and drops it to the ground. She twists her head around to rip off the pill on her sleeve.

She bites through flesh. She jerks back.

It’s Peeta.

“Let me go!” she snarls, almost a scream.

He says, “I can’t.”

* * *

The world is too much and too quiet at once. Peeta wishes he could take apart his skull and smother his thoughts with his hands. He taps out an erratic rhythm on his thigh. He shifts his weight on the prosthetic leg. His mind is stuttering again.

 _We hold another Hunger Games using Capitol children_.

Katniss walks out into the sunlight. Gaul is chained to a post. Peeta’s breath catches in his throat.

“Peeta.” Lucy Gray is standing next to him. There’s concern on her face.

“You loved him,” he whispers, just loud enough to pass as a mumble, disguising it as the residues of a deranged mind. It is suddenly very important that he hear her answer. “You loved him, real or not real?”

Lucy Gray doesn’t hesitate. “Real,” she declares, as if she’s had decades to think about this—as if she knows what she’s lost and can name it unflinchingly.

Peeta considers. “I love her.”

“Yes,” says Lucy Gray, like she already knew. “Watch her.”

Peeta watches.

His world has been turned inside out and transformed into a sharp-toothed beast, but this last vestige of the baker’s boy—who died at sixteen years old, standing in the town square in his last moments of selfhood—this one part of him that survived his painful mutation against all odds, it is _deafening;_ he doesn’t want Katniss Everdeen to die.

When she goes for the Nightlock pill, he clamps a hand over her arm.

* * *

President Gaul dies at the hands of an angry crowd.

* * *

Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark return to the ruins of District 12. Their skin is a patchwork quilt of burn scars and machine-grown tissue. Not quite human. Not quite there.

There are ghosts on the streets they can’t see. There are ghosts in their dreams.

Katniss takes up hunting. Peeta bakes. He burns more batches than he’d like, snatched away from reality by shiny images that grow teeth and claws. She spends more time screaming than sleeping. She wakes tasting grave dirt in her mouth.

They fall into old habits, finding each other in the dark of night and curling into the familiar comfort. It’s the only way they know how to survive.

There’s a ghost who sings to him, leaning her elbows on the kitchen windowsill, sunlight falling through her dark hair. There’s a ghost who walks beside her, silent and insubstantial as they make their trek through the woods, the mockingjays trilling their song overhead.

It’s slow. It’s painful. But the Victors of the Seventy-Fourth Hunger Games relearn how to exist.

They make a book of people they don’t want to forget. Peeta draws them again and again until he’s sure his hand won’t shake on the page. Katniss fills in the margins with tiny script, lest she forget a single piece of what made them who they are in her memories.

* * *

Their first kiss in District 12 happens like this.

Peeta is painting one of Haymitch’s past Tributes, a girl with laughing eyes and a hard mouth. Katniss is watching his eyelashes, how sunlight falls through them to cast them in gold. The two of them are sitting shoulder to shoulder. Katniss is barefoot.

He notices her staring. Blue eyes flick up to meet her gaze.

Her revelation is a quiet one.

There are ghosts in her life, but he’s not one of them. He’s alive. They’re both alive. They saved each other so that they could be here, today, sitting on this couch with sunlight slanting through the windows. When the night has come and gone, they will still exist. Here. Breathing.

And she is glad.

It’s an impulsive decision, but at the same time, it feels predestined.

She grabs the back of the couch, angles her body towards him, and leans closer. She pauses just before their lips meet. She waits.

For a moment, he’s frozen solid. Then he exhales, slow and steady, _alive, alive, alive_.

He closes the distance.

* * *

Someone is humming a familiar song. Peeta blinks, slowly waking.

He didn’t have nightmares. That’s new.

He’s lying on the couch, one arm tucked beneath his head and another barely brushing the carpet. Orange sunlight stretches in from the kitchen windows. It must be nearly dinnertime.

Lucy Gray is sitting on the carpet. She doesn’t touch his hand. “Darling Peeta,” she says, soft and gentle, and just like that, he knows.

“Where are you going?” he asks her. His voice is a little scratchy from sleep. He isn’t quite awake yet. Everything in the living room is painted a lovely golden orange.

It’s a beautifully gentle afternoon. It must be why she chose this moment to say goodbye.

She has always been so very kind to him.

“It’s time to go back to my family,” says Lucy Gray. “I think I could stay with them, this time.”

“Oh.” He searches for something safe to say. “That’s nice.”

Lucy Gray smiles. “It is.”

Peeta sits up, shaking the pins and needles out of the hand he used as a pillow. He puts both feet on the ground, one flesh, one metal. There’s orange in the air, but none of it is shiny.

“Lucy Gray Baird,” he says. “May I have this last dance?”

She laughs and pretends to kiss his hand, almost a physical touch. “Of course.”

Lucy Gray sings a song he’s never heard before. He wonders if it’s her newest composition. He wonders if it’s her last.

She kisses his forehead on the closing note of the song. She says, “Take your time.”

“See you,” he says.

And she’s gone.

She was already a ghost, he reminds himself. She’s just gone to be with her family. He can be happy for her.

It’s still incredibly sad.

The front porch creaks. The door opens.

Katniss says, “Peeta?”

He realizes he’s frozen in place like he just came out of an episode. He releases his limbs from immobility. “Hey.”

“Hey.” Katniss drops her pack and walks over to him. Her hands automatically go around his waist, ready to hold him up. He coaxes the tension out of her arms and turns the touch into a casual hug. Katniss gives him a suspicious look— _if you fall, I have to catch you_ —but she allows it to happen.

“I dreamed a song,” he tells her, because it’s not quite a lie. “I don’t want to forget it, but I’m bad at remembering songs.”

“Sing it for me,” she says, “and I’ll remember it for you.”

* * *

Three and a half years after the end of the war, Katniss hikes to the lake alone and takes a nap by its shores.

She’s pulled from her sleep by a low male voice singing.

> Strange things did happen here  
> No stranger would it be  
> If we met up at midnight in the hanging tree.

The voice goes too slow and steers clear of the high notes. But the tune is more or less intact. It’s not a bad singing voice.

When the voice finishes, the woods rustle in the absence of sound. Then the mockingjays take up the tune, bouncing the song between them until the melody has been built up into something almost unearthly.

Katniss opens her eyes. The ghost—her ghost—is sitting next to her. He couldn’t stand out more in his neat black shirt and trousers, permanently dressed for mourning and surrounded on all sides by green things.

“You sing?” she asks.

“Sometimes,” he says. “It’s my song, you know.”

She blinks. “Really.”

“I’m not lying, you suspicious bastard. I had a life before you were born. It seems I’ve forgotten some of the lyrics, though.”

“Probably because it isn’t your song.”

“Maybe.” He pulls up one knee to his chest. For a moment, he looks nearly alive. “I suppose I’ve never actually sung it before.”

“Because it’s not your song.”

“If I could shove you, I would.” The ghost tilts his face up to the afternoon sun. He shivers, then speaks in a rush: “I killed my brother.”

Katniss is slow to process this information, partway submerged in her post-nap haze. Then she sits up, completely and achingly awake. “Fuck.”

“Quite.”

She tries to think of something to say. “How?”

The ghost is instantly offended. “What do you mean, how? I _killed_ him.”

Her temper flares up, a mirror to his. “I know, you idiot, I meant—what did you use? A gun?”

“There was . . . a Jabberjay.” The ghost is almost vibrating with tension. “I betrayed his trust. He was hanged.”

Katniss wonders if this is the first time he’s confessing to this. “So you’re a fucking snitch.”

“What an elegant choice of words.”

“Is that why the girl who killed you killed you?”

“Most likely. But also because I was quite insane at that point, and I had a gun in my hands.”

“. . . You don’t half-ass things, do you?”

“I would’ve been dead much earlier if I did.”

They’re quiet for a moment. Then Katniss says, “Okay.”

The ghost side-eyes her. “. . . And?”

She shrugs. “And whatever. You’re already dead.”

“Hm.” The ghost looks away. “That’s true.”

A thought strikes her. “Were you waiting for your brother? At the Hanging Tree?”

“Maybe.” He taps his knee. “Or maybe I was simply afraid to move on.”

Katniss recalls an old ghost story about a boy with a rose. The two ghosts in the tunnels, the cousin and the brother—she thinks she knows who they were looking for, now.

“The girl who killed you,” says Katniss, suddenly remembering. “Did you love her?”

The ghost gives her a long, silent look. “You know, I almost killed her. At the end. I had a gun. When I realized she meant to kill me, I sprayed bullets. It was literally my last act.”

Katniss waits.

“I don’t know. I wasn’t . . . I don’t think I had the—capacity. I . . . maybe.” He chews at his lip. “I don’t know.”

Katniss keeps waiting.

“Maybe,” he says, ever so carefully, as if he’s giving words to a thought so blasphemous it shouldn’t be voiced. “Maybe if there were no Games. Maybe if I met her at one of her performances, and we could . . . .”

As he hesitates, Katniss notices that he looks younger than her now. He must have died on the cusp of Reaping age.

“No,” he says at last, putting unnecessary force behind the statement. “I didn’t love her.”

Katniss lies back in the grass, choosing to do him the favor of feigned ignorance. “Okay.”

The sun inches westward. The silence stretches between them.

The ghost says, “I came to say goodbye, actually.”

“Leaving?” she asks.

“In a sense, I suppose. Gaul is dead. My Games are over. It’s time to face the afterlife, if there is one.”

Katniss pushes herself up on one elbow. “Any last words?”

“None I would want preserved.” The ghost pauses, then continues in a deliberately casual voice. “The stylist from the Capitol. Tigris, I think. She helped you. You should send her something.”

“What, like a token of thanks?”

“Why not?”

She studies him in the fading sun. His neutral expression says he doesn’t care what she chooses to do, but his hand shifts a little, barely twitching against the grass blades he can’t touch.

“A token,” she says. “Okay.”

“Okay,” the ghost repeats. He stands. “Well, Katniss Everdeen. It was good to know you.”

Katniss doesn’t know how she should say goodbye to him. “Likewise.”

He walks into the woods.

It’s as simple as that.

Katniss stays by the lake for a while. She doesn’t know what she’s feeling. When she realizes she still doesn’t know his name, the strange feeling in her chest intensifies.

There’s a faint sound of boots on fallen leaves. “Katniss?”

It’s Peeta.

“I’m here,” she says, getting to her feet.

She asks Peeta for a favor.

He paints her a rose, curling white petals on cream-colored paper. She slides the drawing into an envelope and mails it, unlabeled and unclaimed.

* * *

Haymitch Abernathy accompanies Katniss Everdeen back to the ashen remains of their childhood home. Weeks later, Peeta Mellark returns as well. Against all possible odds, the three Victors of District 12 have survived the destruction of their world.

His kids are wrecked, the first year back. The girl is close to catatonic for six months. The boy drops random plates and neatly apologizes, as if he wasn’t just trapped in a waking nightmare. Haymitch thinks there might be no greater punishment for his sins than watching them fall apart like he once did, squashed flat under the weight of time.

Then, slowly, inexplicably, they grow back into their shells. The girl starts tracking in dirt on her hunting boots, carrying dead fowl over her shoulder. The boy no longer drops his carefully wrapped plates of cheese rolls.

They get a joint arts and craft project going. Haymitch watches them curled up on the couch, the boy brushing light paint strokes on brittle pages, the girl staring at the boy as he paints. After a while they switch places, the girl inking spidery letters under the pictures as the boy traces his eyes down the line of her braid.

They show him their book of the dead. Haymitch gives them the names of the children he ferried to their deaths. The names are added in, no questions asked.

There are so many questions they could be asking. If they asked, he’d tell them. _This is why I left you for dead. This is what I sold you into. These are the options I weighed. These are the deals I struck._

He doesn’t have good answers for either of them. Once they learn that, they might do the smart thing. They might finally cut him out of their lives.

They don’t ask. Haymitch can’t fathom why.

Seven years after the end of the war, they make things official. They tell him about a private Toasting—early morning, just the two of them—and invite him to dinner.

Haymitch asks them if they’re sure they don’t want the evening to themselves. They look at him like he sprouted goat horns.

“I cooked too much food, and it’s not like we have anyone else we can ask over,” says the boy, quickly closing off the possibility of refusal with an appeal to Haymitch’s ever-diminishing sense of basic decency.

The girl just rolls her eyes. She says, “Lay off the alcohol tonight, okay?” Then she takes the boy’s hand and heads outside, her boots leaving stark footprints on the floor.

Haymitch swishes his liquor around the bottle. He thinks about what his life has become.

They’re still alive, those two. Against all possible odds, he’s starting to believe they’ll stay that way.

He puts the bottle down and gets up to check on the geese.

Maybe he’ll drop by the town to scrounge up a last-minute gift.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's a blush rose,  
> with raspberry scent.
> 
> Here's a pink,  
> come taste the edge.
> 
> And here, my dear,  
> upon the stair,  
> is simply the hip  
> of a white-blue rose  
> I've carried up  
> to bed.
> 
> \- L.L. Barkat


End file.
